Ever received a snippet of video from a friend with a MAC and not had it play? I wont go into the PC/Mac dichotomy other than to say that the PC world seems to have more solutions to Mac created problems than the other way around. So, converting video files from one format to another is one of the more frustrating tasks you can have to do as you are confronted with the arcane language of codecs, acronyms and incompatible file formats.
Enter stage right MediaCoder
Here is the hype …
MediaCoder is an open source universal audio/video batch transcoder (converter), which puts together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats. With many extra features and a expandable architecture, MediaCoder is more than a GUI of a bunch of command line tools.
- Convert to and from many audio and video compression formats and re-multiplex into various container formats, on the fly, in batch
- Give you the control over the transcoding process and all the parameters of the transcoded files, so you can learn about, compare among and play with various codecs
- Specific user interfaces for specific devices with device plug-ins and extensions
- Fully standalone, no dependent on any media player, filter or codec, no registration of any components into system
- Multilingual user interface
MediaCoder is a free open-source utility that was developed to help users move their video around easily, for example to iPods or PSPs. While Microsoft has the very useful Windows Media Encoder and Mac has Quicktime and they are arguably very good formats, this does not allow you to move video files from almost any format to almost any other format.
Now if you have played with video you know two things already
A: It’s not fast and
B: See A
MediaCoder is not extremely fast when doing complicated transcodings. This isn’t really the programs fault though; it has to decode the file from the old format and then recode it the new format you have chosen.
About now I should also point out it’s a spiffy little audio converter as well.
Oh yeah, it comes in colours. MediaCoder offers skins as well.
Highly recommended.